


Juggling

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Friendship, Jeffriestube, ThiswasthehardestthingI'veever written, ficexchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-14
Updated: 2016-10-14
Packaged: 2018-08-22 09:38:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8281286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: The prompt for an exchange on Tumblr: "Janeway and B'Elanna friendship of any sort."  Janeway and B'Elanna have a conversation post 'Deadlock'.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Author's notes: by far the hardest thing I've ever written ( no smut, no angst, no OTP) and I enjoyed it immensely.
> 
> Innumerable thanks to Mia Cooper, without whom this would never have seen the light of day. I am lucky to have such a like-minded, clever and darkfic! loving beta. 
> 
> Disclaimer: . I do not own the characters, or any plot/ references which are clearly CBS' or Paramount's and whoever else owns Trek. I make no monetary gain from this.

 

* * *

“Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.” **-Evelyn Waugh**

* * *

 

 

 

 

B'Elanna keyed the entry code into the console, leaning against the bulkhead to her left and taking a breath before the Jeffries tube hatch hissed open. Last one, she promised herself. Then maybe she'd go and beat the shit out of some poor unsuspecting character on the holodeck.

 Seventh blown out relay today, she thought ruefully, girding herself as she set her knees on the edge and slipped the tool case into the mouth of the tube.

 It was only appropriate that the Chief of Engineering mucked in, and the plasma relays were so destroyed from the continued abuse of the bursts that near enough all of them required replacing.  There were three in this juncture alone, between deck six and seven, and she lugged the parts into the tube behind her, reaching over and pulling them in.

 It was arduous work, and she'd laboured almost around the clock since the duplicate _Voyager_ had blown itself, and the Vidiian ship, to smithereens.

 If she was so inclined, she might have spent more time thinking about the alternate her that had stood in an identical Engineering and been summarily blown into the vastness of the Delta Quadrant. 

 As things stood, she didn't have the energy for that. She only had the energy to heal her ship, this ship she'd adopted like a reluctant and put upon victim adopts a cantankerous- but mildly lovable - stray cat. 

 And anyway, the thought made her vulnerable in a way she despised. Every cell that was threaded with Klingon blood balked at the human in her, who feared death and nothingness as much as the next woman. The Klingon mocked it.

 And it made B'Elanna feel irritated, in an ill-defined way. In a way she couldn't grasp and was disinclined to examine. 

 She shuffled forward, head held low, into the juncture where the redundant plasma manifolds were located. 

 She was so busy dragging the kit, and necessary pieces behind her, that she startled when someone spoke.

 "Hello Lieutenant."

 Torres jerked her head up so fast she nearly smacked it on the hard top of the Jeffries tube. Immediately she felt rage rise in her, tempered only by the diplomacy she was trying hard to learn. 

 But she hated to be frightened like that.

 "I didn't mean to startle you," Janeway said, not really sounding contrite at all, as she rustled about the tools at her knees for a laser driver.

 She found it, and began immediately to twist off an old manifold, scorched and belching.

 "What are you doing here?"

 Immediately, a powerful fear of Janeway's motivation had blinded B'Elanna. Self-conscious lack of belief had started to tug, strong and sore, at her confidence as Chief Engineer.

 Janeway looked up, eyes narrow.

 "Repairing the ship," she answered, "Lieutenant."

 "You don't need to," B'Elanna shuffled to the panel beside her, and began - more aggressively than necessary - to expose the delicate systems beneath. It was testament to Janeway's patience - or Chakotay's influence - that the captain didn't lose her temper in light of B'Elanna's tone.

 They'd worked together, they were nothing short of necessary acquaintances, and so they'd come to understand how the other worked. That being said, B'Elanna knew they weren't overly fond of each other. She'd never have chosen Janeway as an associate, never mind a friend. 

 The likelihood of them ever having met, save not for the other woman's disastrously noble decision to strand them here, was highly unlikely. Their orbits were utterly different.

 One gifted, upper-echelons, charmed.

 The other clawing, half-bred and furious.

 They'd never have met, neither in the literal sense nor the metaphorical. 

 "I know that," Janeway said politely, taking a moment to shrug off her jacket and abandon it in the tube. "But I also know you're working round the clock, and I'm restless."

 B'Elanna watched her delicately detach the manifold bolt, just at the top.

 She examined it for a moment, then chucked it aside. 

 "Screwed," Janeway murmured.

 Then, when she realised her miscalculated profanity, she seemed a little embarrassed. 

 For the first time since she'd crawled into the godforsaken tube, B'Elanna loosened a little. Janeway’s casual profanity, at odds with her cool professionalism, made her relax.

 "I suspect all of them are going to be screwed, Captain," she said casually, sitting the piece of panelling aside. 

 "Most likely," Janeway began coaxing the manifold out of its connect to the ship, a wry smile replacing her embarrassment.

 "Captain, you don't strike me as the manual labour type."

 It was out, with all the judgement it carried, before she could swallow it again. 

 Janeway shrugged, as if shirking an annoying fly. 

 "You don't know a great deal about me," she answered. "And that's as it should be." 

 For the first time in the exchange, B'Elanna felt suddenly embarrassed by her own rudeness. She held a grudging loyalty to this woman, but it was tinged with a contempt for Janeway’s ruthless sense of morality, and it often made B’Elanna awkwardly hard around her.

 B’Elanna had long ago shed any sense of moral monochrome, she didn’t believe in it, and Janeway was a complete juxtaposition to that.

 "Sorry, Captain. I'm just tired."

 Janeway motioned to the mess around her own oil stained trousers and then to the space at her side.

 "Have a seat, B'Elanna," she smiled that slightly kind, but very practised, smile.

 They worked in amicable silence for a while, and B'Elanna glanced surreptitiously at those pale, immaculate hands to find that every time she did they were doing everything with a finesse which left B’Elanna herself feeling a little redundant. 

 "I like to know how my ship works," Janeway eventually explained into the silence, as if desperate to fill it, smearing a hand across her cheek and leaving a streak of oil there. "It's easy for a captain to give orders but if they can't do the job as much as the next man it seems contrived."

 "No one thinks you can't do the job."

 It wasn't a compliment, it was a fact. Janeway could do the job with her eyes closed.

 Janeway smiled a little.

 "Thanks."

 "You've got oil on your cheek."

 "Least it's not blood." Janeway tugged the tank from her waistband and used the edge of it to swipe the stain from her face.

 "Doc did a good job on it," B'Elanna said, fingers twisting a particularly tricky piece of conduit out of place.

 It was practically melted.

 “I know,” Janeway agreed. “Even I was concerned it would scar.”

 B’Elanna glanced at the cheek, now smooth and white, that had been slit open when she’d been flung from her chair on the bridge.

 Despite how well it had healed, she’d seen it when Janeway had marched into engineering, and it hadn’t been the little cuts and bruises the rest of the crew endured. Blood had been smeared down her cheek but she’d paid it no mind. It was at these junctures of extreme crisis where Janeway was at her best; scarred, scientific, hard as diamonds.

 It was only then that B’Elanna could like her.

 She wondered, just at that moment, how many body blows Janeway had taken for this ship already. There was something admirable and stupid about it, all at once. But, B’Elanna gave grudgingly, she inspired loyalty. And that loyalty was born of her sheer, unbending determination to do the right thing.

 Janeway was not the kind of person B’Elanna wanted to get to know. Yet here she was, getting to know her and, in a strangely resentful way, starting to be curious about her.

 “You know I used to hate pain,” Janeway said into the silence again. “But I’ve grown used to it.”

 “I’m a Klingon…we look for it,” B’Elanna answered, and the other woman smirked.

 “Sometimes it’s the things you don’t see…” Janeway continued, almost as if to herself, and her voice had grown quiet and a little off-centre of its usual tight demand. “You know what I mean?”

 B’Elanna nodded; there was no one better qualified in the art of hidden pain than she herself.

 “I know what you mean.”

 The captain’s fingers paused as she slid the new manifold into place.

 “It feels odd…” she shrugged. “That other me. She did what she had to do.”

  It wasn’t phrased as a question, but it was.

 B’Elanna stole a glance at her and saw, for the first time in nearly two years, a vulnerability about Kathryn Janeway that was so real as to seem invasive. Her eyes were wide and panicked looking, glassy with the reservation of someone on the brink of tears.

 Then as instantly as that she shut it down.

 B’Elanna swallowed, wondering if she’d hallucinated the sudden sense of desperation that had come over the captain.

 “You’ve always done what you had to do,” she said softly, silently acknowledging that she, herself, hadn’t.

 Janeway twisted her neck to look at her, with both incredulity and arrogance on her face.

 B’Elanna could see why Chakotay had a thing for the captain – and he did, no matter how he denied it the few times she’d danced towards the centre of the subject with him. She’d thought her friendship with Chakotay stretched to laddish teasing, but when it came to the captain nothing was funny.

  He liked women he couldn’t have, and Janeway was about as far away from tying herself to anything as _Voyager_ was from home.

 And she was arrogant to the extreme.

 Of course Chakotay had a thing for her.

 “I know you blame me for our being stranded here, B’Elanna.”

 “I did,” B’Elanna said honestly. “I don’t anymore.”

 Janeway smiled, but it was a little bitter and just a little cruel.

 “I don’t make any apologies for it.”

 “Nor should you,” B’Elanna answered, settling against the opposite side of the tube for a moment. She didn’t want to argue, suddenly. Instead she wanted to be honest. “There’s no point. We’re here now. I did blame you. But how can I hold your belief system and mine up against each other? You are Starfleet to the bone, and I’m…”

 She laughed instead of finishing the words.

 "I suppose so,” the captain agreed. “But we both want to get home.”

 “I don’t,” B’Elanna blurted, before she could contain the honesty from making her vulnerable.

 The captain frowned, “No?”

 “My life is a million times better out here than it was there.”

 Janeway nodded her head, as if considering the words deeply. And it occurred to B’Elanna she might well be.

 “At least that’s something,” Janeway shrugged, and her eyes were suddenly dull. “I am glad to hear you’re happy.”

 B’Elanna watched her for a moment as she examined the gapping in the conduit.

 “Are you happy?”

 If B’Elanna had ever considered herself brave, it was pale in comparison to what she thought of herself now.  The question was out, however, and there was no way of forcing it back in.

 The other woman lifted a fresh piece of conduit and began twisting it into the space she’d just cleared out. She didn’t look at B’Elanna as she spoke.

 “I don’t know that the captain has any right to be happy,” she answered.

 And the implication was plain.

 “That’s ridiculous.”

 Janeway glanced at B’Elanna, with a rueful smile.

 “That as the case may be. But my personal happiness needs to come second to-”

 “Your duty?”

 The captain swiped her hands over her trousers and twisted, so she was facing B’Elanna. She settled against the other panelling with her knees pulled up.

 “Yes, my duty. And getting this ship home.”

 B’Elanna mimicked her posture on the opposite side of the small space, so they were facing each other.

 There weren’t many years between them, but B’Elanna had always seen Kathryn Janeway as much older. She didn’t look it now. If anything, she looked young and just a little bit lost.

 “I can’t waste time on thinking about that other ship, about that other me…Chakotay says-”

 She stopped herself and looked at B’Elanna, realising she’d been about to share something she didn’t want to. B’Elanna pitied her then, pitied the woman who was slowly being consumed by a role she had no choice but to fulfil. And the woman who could not be a woman, just by virtue of her rank.

“I wonder if I could have done it,” she shrugged, as if that other Janeway’s choice had been trivial. “I wonder what it takes…”

 “You have it,” B’Elanna assured, thinking that was what she needed to hear.

 “Maybe that’s what terrifies me.”

  B’Elanna looked at her, saw tears gathering, unbidden, in her eyes.

 “Captain…”

 The other woman swiped the tears furiously away from her pale cheeks, cheeks unscarred and white and tired looking. There were scars though, forming under layers of decisions and choices which no one person should be forced to bear alone.

 Yet here she was. And not through choice, B’Elanna realised.

 “Oh B’Elanna,” she used the heel of her hand to brush the tears away. “Just a moment of weakness.”

 “I know we’re not friends…but if you need someone to talk to…” B’Elanna let the words linger, not sure how to commit to them. And certainly unsure as to whether or not Janeway wanted to hear them.

 “Thank you,” the captain smiled. “Don’t tell anyone you found the captain sobbing in a Jeffries tube.”

 “I didn’t find you sobbing, I found you working.”

 The captain smiled a watery smile.

 “I might take you up on your offer, once in a while.”

 B’Elanna nodded, “I’m not much use, and I get angry…but I could get angry with you if you wanted.”

 Janeway laughed then, and it wasn’t much, but it was better than it could have been.

 “You know, B’Elanna, that might work for me,” she smiled. “I could use some therapeutic anger.”

 B’Elanna was about to answer, when Janeway’s combadge chirped into the waiting silence. She sighed, just a little, and tapped it.

 “Janeway here.”

 _“Captain, there’s a starship off our bow, hailing us. They’re claiming we’re invading their space,”_ Chakotay explained.

 He sounded tense.

 She hung her head for a moment, preparing for another battle, then lifted it.

 “I’m coming, Commander.”

Then she stretched her small legs out, almost flat even in the small tube, and rolled her neck.

 B’Elanna watched all of this with the knowledge that, whatever had happened between them, it’d be left in this tube when she went.

 That was how it had to be.

 And B’Elanna admired her most just for that.

 Janeway nodded, silently, and left the tube.

 

 

 

 


End file.
